1512 Week 2 post

Chapter 8 was a brain frying chapter. No, I mean that in a good way. I actually really took a lot away from this chapter. This chapter was on "Analyzing Data". It was a lot of, take this info and tell me a, b and c.

The first part of the chapter went over the basics of graphs, like a dot plot, stem and leaf plot, histographs and the classic bar graph. One thing that I found interesting was the difference between a histograph and a bar graph. They look the same, L shaped with vertical columns. The histograph's are side by side and the bar graphs are spaced apart. Our textbook calls it "nonadjacent intervals". Does a graph have a positive, negative or zero correlation? That was pretty easy to recognize. This was not the part that made my brain hurt.....that was the next section.

Like I explained in the beginning. The challenge of figuring it all out was a good thing. I have discovered that I am not an "abstract" math learner. I prefer to be told this is how you solve a problem, now follow along and do it. This may bring a further challenge to me as a teacher though because I need to be open to different ways of figuring things out. My husband for example, does a lot of math in his head. When I am working on problems,  he peeks over and just blurts out the answer. I have to kindly remind him, "Hey dude, back off. I can't learn that way!" But maybe I should be asking him to show me how he does that. Maybe it would "click" with me and allow me to broaden my scope of teaching. Even if it doesn't "click" with me, it may be helpful and "click" with one of my students down the road.

I do like formulas that you can just plug in your numbers. I, however, do not enjoy memorizing them. Something else I have to work on. I feel like I have a good understanding of "mean" - the average "median"- the middle and "range" - the distance between the smallest and largest numbers. Ah the variance. It is tedious work. But having the green box pop up "FANTASTIC!" is so rewarding. I made it and I look forward to the next.....

PS Here is a link to enchanted learning with a sample of a worksheet that can be used to teach graphing to students using dinosaurs.Enchanted Learning